MedTech Frontiers - October Seminar

The Bright Future of Nuclear Medicine: PET and SPECT imaging

About the Seminar:

Single Photon Computed Tomography (SPECT) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) are highly sensitive medical imaging modalities that are clinically used for diagnosis and staging of diseases such as cancer and heart disease. SPECT and PET are based on radiolabeled tracers that are injected into the patient and concentrate at specific sites depending on the biochemical characteristics of the tracer. The radioactive probes decay and emit γ-photons that are recorded by the imager. The resulting images are used to reconstruct a 3D representation of the radiotracer distribution in the body. Importantly, in contrast to anatomic imaging modalities like CT, SPECT and PET are functional and molecular imaging modalities. Thus they are sensitive to metabolic processes, perfusion, and biologic processes taking place at the cellular and subcellular levels.

In this seminar we review the basic principles of SPEC and PET, provide an overview of common procedures, and discuss in some detail the challenges and opportunities in the development of instrumentation for these modalities..

About the Speaker:

Dr. Tobias Funk  Dr. Tobias Funk has over 10 years of experience in the development of instrumentation for science and medicine. Dr. Funk has broad experience in the areas of SPECT/CT imaging, image reconstruction, X-ray spectroscopy and NMR of biological and solid state materials, and he has expertise in low temperature, vacuum technology, detector physics, algorithm development and modeling and simulation of complex systems. Dr. Funk has worked as a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and in the Department of Radiology at the University of California, San Francisco. He received his MS and Ph.D. from Free University Berlin, Germany.